CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 271 km round trip from Agliè - roughly 5 h 15 in the saddle. It goes by way of VI.1-Emissario, Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine, Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal and back through Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,750 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. The line favours views over speed.
Agliè is a small town in the Canavese, the hilly district north of Turin that spreads between the Po plain and the mouths of the Alpine valleys, and its castle is far grander than the town around it. Begun as a medieval fortress by the San Martino counts, it was transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into a baroque residence and later bought by the House of Savoy, who turned it into a summer palace with richly decorated rooms, a chapel, a theatre and a large park with fountains and a lake. It is part of the UNESCO listing of the Residences of the Royal House of Savoy, a ring of palaces around Turin, and Italian television viewers may recognise it from a popular costume drama filmed there.
Read the complete Castello di Agliè write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Castello di Agliè is where the day begins. Next is VI.1-Emissario, 34 km on.
Lago di Viverone is a small, warm lake in northern Piedmont, cupped inside one of the most remarkable glacial landforms in Europe. Ice flowing out of the Aosta Valley during the last glaciations dumped a vast ring of moraine here, the Morainic Amphitheatre of Ivrea, and its eastern wall, the Serra, runs for many kilometres as an almost perfectly straight wooded ridge. The lake sits at the foot of it, with the villages of Viverone and Azeglio on its shores and Ivrea around a quarter of an hour's ride to the northwest.
Read the complete VI.1-Emissario write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
VI.1-Emissario comes up about 37 km into the recorded legs. Next is Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine.
Oropa is a sanctuary on a scale that surprises everyone who comes up the valley from Biella for the first time. At almost twelve hundred metres, in a bowl of mountains, a vast complex of churches, courtyards, porticoes and pilgrim lodgings rises in terraces, built over several centuries around an ancient chapel that holds a Black Madonna, a wooden statue of the Virgin that legend attributes to St Luke. Above the main buildings, a Sacro Monte of chapels with life-size statues illustrates the life of Mary along a wooded path. It is one of the nine Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy listed by UNESCO in 2003, and one of the most important Marian shrines in the Alps.
Read the complete Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 74 km into the recorded legs you reach Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine. Next is Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal.
Varallo is a small town at the point where the Valsesia stops being a wide valley and starts becoming a mountain one, and above it, on a rocky spur reached by a winding road or a short cable car, is the oldest and most ambitious of the Sacri Monti. In 1491 a Franciscan friar called Bernardino Caimi, back from the Holy Land, set out to recreate Jerusalem here for pilgrims who could never make the journey. The result is a hilltop village of more than forty chapels filled with life-size painted terracotta and wooden figures, hundreds of them, telling the life of Christ like a frozen theatre. Gaudenzio Ferrari, the great Renaissance painter of this valley, worked on many of them.
Read the complete Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal, about halfway. Next is back through Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine sits at 134 km, about halfway. Next is back through VI.1-Emissario, 34 km on.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete VI.1-Emissario write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through VI.1-Emissario comes up about 234 km into the recorded legs. Next is Castello di Agliè.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Castello di Agliè write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Castello di Agliè closes the day.
Castello di Agliè → VI.1-Emissario is 37 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
VI.1-Emissario → Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine is 37 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine → Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Sacro Monte o “Nuova Gerusalemme” di Varal → back through Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine is 62 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Sacro Monte della Beata Vergine → back through VI.1-Emissario is 37 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through VI.1-Emissario → Castello di Agliè is 37 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.